A desiccated bat, found in one of the legal encyclopedias in the law library of the Canal Zone District Court.
What’s the strangest thing you ever found in a book?
371–380 of 481 posts
Re: What’s the strangest thing you ever found in a book?
#372Earlier quoted context omitted.
That's the sixth book, "Harry Potter and the Half-Blood Prince". But if I recall correctly, the original owner of the book, the Half-Blood Prince, was none other than Snape, not Voldemort.
God I thought that was such a weird book. It attempts to build loads of tension around the idea that an old textbook has gasp prewritten notes in it. I know that it tries to imply it might be Voldemort's textbook but even if it was... would that be a huge deal unless it had something useful/interesting specifically about Voldemort? For me at least that part of it fell spectacularly flat
Did you read the second book? Voldemort's diary plays a huge part in that one, so it's not surprising that the characters would find Voldemort's text book interesting or ominous (possible horcrux too).
Re: What’s the strangest thing you ever found in a book?
#373My gender, actually
Re: What’s the strangest thing you ever found in a book?
#374This is such a good opening for a great book
Re: What’s the strangest thing you ever found in a book?
#375Earlier quoted context omitted.
We used to place ads in a newspaper to find fellow Commodore/Amiga/Spectrum/Atari users to trade games with. It was not uncommon that my Saturdays involved my parents dropping me off at some random person's house (which might or might not have been my age) and picking me up a few hours later.
This scene was incredibly strong in Norway back in the days, speaking as a then-teenager there.
These days this would not fly... The risk of dropping a kid at some stranger's house all alone with a few floppies or tapes in this day and age could get a parent a stern visit from social services. But it was acceptable in the 80s...
Re: What’s the strangest thing you ever found in a book?
#376This might be giving away some secret of sorts but here we go:
Sarasota is a unique place.
Goodwill maintains dedicated bookstores - selling books at $2 each. Needless to say the stores are always well visited. There are always new amazing books streaming through. I once met a young bookseller lady from Houston who drove all the way to fill her truck with books from here.
And, as the article hinted at, the area itself acts twofold: as a magnet and a filter. Being an artsy famous cultured beach town it attracts the often rich and successful retirees who, after having spent a life of collecting books but then because of age and many moves having to narrow down their collection end up with the best of the best books on any topic thus singled out and neatly brought to Sarasota. When these fine folks pass away they leave the treasures for the rest of us (unless their children have any idea what they are just about to give away). So, very often, you would bump into a new book, look at the artful ‘Ex libris’ sticker left on the first page and realize another collection of someone interesting just arrived. To honor those I usually try to pick up all their treasures and add them to my own collection which the kids have been instructed to keep together and hand down over the centuries…
Re: What’s the strangest thing you ever found in a book?
#377Earlier quoted context omitted.
Do you recommend HMOR? I’ve never heard of it, but the Wikipedia page sounded interesting
no it's terrible, see: https://danluu.com/su3su2u1/hpmor/
Actually, I agree with lots of the stuff said by the reviewer, but most of them are not such dealbreakers for me as they are for him. At least I read the book as having fun with all the gaps in the wizard world and the personal fantasies of the author are on the back burner.
Re: What’s the strangest thing you ever found in a book?
#378367 comments here, and not a single one left at the original article's own blog! What a missed opportunity.
Re: What’s the strangest thing you ever found in a book?
#379Earlier quoted context omitted.
The books were worth tens of thousands of dollars (sold individually on the second-hand book market, after being carefully catalogued etc.), but nobody interested in buying books happened to be at the auction and the auctioneer set a $1 minimum bid because he didn’t know anything about books and was more interested in disposing of the books than making money from the sale. The auction house could surely get significa…
In the late 90s in Atlanta I got my first ever Mac computer (Performa iirc??) at an estate sale for free because it was "broken". The way we established that it was broken was because the power switch on the back of it did not do anything. I got home, did some light digging on the internet and determined that the power switch on the back is the main power, and that actually turning on the computer involved pushing on…
Why did you stop going to estate sales?
Re: What’s the strangest thing you ever found in a book?
#380Earlier quoted context omitted.
Quoting: > ... I looked through some of the books in the top boxes and realized that there were some very old, and often valuable, books in this boxes. You're right that this isn't saying that the books were definitely worth a lot of money, so it really say something remotely similar.
That's a far stretch to "tens of thousands of dollars." A valuable second-hand book can be $50.
It's true, if none of the books were rare, it might have only been thousands of dollars.